Suddenly, Several things happen in rapid sequence:1. the blackbox beeps six times in rapid succession2. Sally's voice erupts from Brantley's Pocket device3. a singularity vortex surrounds Brantley, knocking Mad Jack and everyone else away4. Mad Jack suddenly disappears from view, the new Diesel Engine of the 1890s Beau Rosin can be heard outside, and the THUMP-A*dink*! THUMP-A*dink*! THUMP-A*dink*! THUMP-A*dink*! sound of the Chronojammer can be heard, fading away to nothingness.

Brantley can be blurrily discerned within the vortex, with the earphone of the Twillbuddy telephony device pressed to his ear; "Sally? HELLO?! Oh, there you are. Say, what gives? where did you send Jac-- oh, ok. The vortex took him involuntarily? how 'bout that... No...no, now, wait a second, they need me here, you cain't just whisk me offter th' 12th century...oh, OK.

Brantley sticks his head out of the vortex and yells, "IF ANYBODY NEEDS ME JUST RING TH' CHURCHBELL IN TH' OLD SHAVE-AND-A-HAIRCUT PATTERN< AND ILL BE RIGHT BACK!

He pulls his head in again, and resumes talking with sally via the pocket device's phone...NO, WAIT! WHAT ABOUT THE NEW...NO, no,no,no, you caint just transduct me...*the scene changes from the barroom to a taproom just outside of Londinium, circa 1165* ...from 1895 to the twelfth century without a costume change, it says so in the Employee Handbook...oh..." he looks around the taproom, then at his byrnie-and-hauberk, with bastard sword on a baldric and battle-board leaning against his hip. He checks to be sure the blaster is still on his person, as he's no great shakes with a lance...

[[OOC: As much as I wish to continue this, I'd feel very guilty getting involved again right now. I leave wednesday morning and will be gone through sunday, and then leave again the following thursday night and will be gone for upwards of a week, if not a day or two longer. But, if people are down with me being sporadic, I'll start back in...]]

OOC" sounds fine to me ,as you can tell by prior postings i have some trouble keeping up with things so thank you all very much for letting me play in the shallow end of the pond Miles (a sailor)Martin

Logged

Who you calling old, Sonny boy? Just because my birth certificate is on birch bark there isn't any reason to be calling names.machinist for hire/ mechanic at largeWarning : minstrel with a five string banjo

(OOC: *voice from the aether between times go ahead and start if you want, just ringthe church bell in a shave-and-a-haircut pattern, and Brantley'll be back in a trice! And welcoime, Miles, and Gentleman Adventurer)...

[[OOC: I'll answer to the church bells as well. In the meantime, I must go back to wrestling with this @#($*% Regency that's giving me fits. It's higher on the priority list than the Steampunk at the moment. Otherwise, just have a

It's midnight in Purgatory, New Mexico, and out of the gloom a bright beam of light pierces the darkness, as the sound of a small steam engine running flat out, hissing at irregular moments as the cycle it's been mounted on hits the occasional bad spot in the road and plows on through it. The rider, dressed in a flight cap and heavily-shrouded goggles, gray-brown duster, pegged black riding trousers, lace-up, knee-high boots, and armed with what appears to be either a Bergmann magazine pistol or a broomhandle mauser, reaches down to the engine and controls under the seat and closes off the steam valve, then brakes and brings the contraption to an eventual stop in front of the Saloon. He (for it is a man) removes the respirator and then a bandana from over his mouth and lower face, revealing a black-and-grey moustache and pressure marks on the skin indicating where the respirator sealed against it.

The man (for such it is), still begoggled, shows no surprise that the saloon is still open, but stands up off of the saddle and then staggers into the saloon. He yells for the barkeep and a bottle of Sarsaparilla, another of whiskey, and a tall glass, and pours the two together into the glass, dropping the money on the bar in between bottles, and then chugs down the whole glass and wheezes a while.

"It appears to be." Came a reply from a corner table, where a man who looked to be in his early thirties was leaned back in a chair against the wall.

He wore a gun belt covered in diamondback snakeskin and decorated with bright silver, and a matched pair of .44 revolvers rested at his hips in holsters of the same design. He was dressed plainly otherwise, jeans and a brown work shirt that showed little dust of the trail. An old gray hat was pulled low over his dusty brown hair, but leaned back as he was he could watch the room. His brown eyes seemed distant, seeing farther into the past than it otherwise looked like he could have been.

The night passed a minute more like wings of velvet, dark and deep and still. Outside, the wind rattled a loose door, and whispered between the cracks in the boards. But even that seemed distant, faraway. The old clock above the bar kept time with deep, slow ticks.

An older man sitting near the bar, after asking the name of the man that had just come in, half-turned and said. "Yeh never did tell us yer name either, stranger."

"S-" He started to say, and then paused thoughtfully. "Joe Hallaway." He said, both in answer and to no one in particular, as if it was something he kept saying to remember. Something to hold on to, where everything else was fading. There was some quiet muttering from a far table, the name 'Rattlesnake' Joe Hallaway had been heard recently in these parts. The man didn't seem to notice or mind. The name, the year. That was all that was definite, and the shadows of some life he wasn't sure, at this hour or place, if he'd ever lived.

'What was it, where was I?' He muttered, almost too quietly to hear his own words. 'A different lifetime perhaps... long gone or yet to be?'

"Mr. Hallaway," the Steamcyclist nodded at the man with the two peacemakers. He nodded also at the old man, and introduced himself. "Jephremiah Cornelius" The name dropped and hit the floor like a lead brick.

"UNICORN JEPH CORNELIUS!?" A rather skinny fellow in the back of the room, under the slant of the stairway, exclaimed incredulously. "You're s'posed ta be DAID!" he began to paw at his gunleather, and said in a voice that was obviously intended to be deadly(but failed miserably), "But you's still wanted, yooneycorn, an' I'm takin' you in fer the bounty awn ya!"

BOOOM

The skinny, hapless bounty hunter hit the wall behind him a bare second after a wide pattern of rifle balls and splash of his own blood, and he slid to the floor along with his life essence, dead before he reached the dusty floorboards.

Cornelius dropped the extremely-short 50-caliber 10-barrelled volley gun that he had unexpectedly pulled from under his duster and armpit on it's strap, and let it dangle as he smoothly drew and cocked his Bergmann, with his right hand, and a .45-caliber peppermill with the other, and covered the room. "Anybody else wanna get rich quick?"(OOC:No, it was a wannabe bounty hunter, not Hallaway that got splattered.-------Meet Jephremiah Cornelius. there will be a British family by that name in about another century and a half, but they will be no relations or offspring of Jeph's; the man's an outlaw, and a man from another time, and there are things about him that make it unlikely that he will sire any human children. Mr. Cornelius is, as the scrawny young would-be Bounty Killer implied, dead. As a doornail. Takin' the ol' Dirt nap. In fact, he takes one as often as he can manage--when he's not hunting his own kind...)

After a few seconds of no one pulling at their gunleather, Jeph holstered his own weapons and went to inspect the body of the "Bounty Killer", finding upon rolling him over that he did indeed have long canines (they had flashed when he spoke), and that the silver rifle balls were slowly burning him away from the inside out. A new fledgling, then, he thought. Otherwise he'd be ash by now.He tore the bib-front shirt open, exposing the symmetrical branding scar, upended cross paramount, used by his nemesis to indentify his "children."

He took from the hard-leather pouch at his belt a thick phial, and held it to the still, oozing bullet wounds, catching enough of his residual blood to fill the phial; he then replaced the phial in his pouch. He then took the pendant from his neck, placed upon the exact center of the corpse, said a phrase in latin, and the body flash-burnt to fine white ash that crumbled away in the slight breeze that wafted up from nowhere. Jeph collected the silver slugs that were left behind, piled the man's weapons on the table next to which he had fallen, and took the ammunition that fit his weaponry, leaving the rest and its guns behind.

HE tipped his hat to the two other strangers, and the room in general, and stepped backwards out the saloon doors, turned and walked across teh board walk to his cycle, spun a crank-wheel on the cycle a few times, starting a jet of kerosene-fueled flame, which began heating the water in the coils of the flash-boiler. He began walking the cycle down the street, then flipped a lever which actuated a blower device (running off of the rotation of the rear wheel), which fed the kerosene jet and caused it to leap up higher and brighter. Then, running beside it, he jumped and rested one foot on teh left stirrup and used his right to continue rolling the cycle forward, then sat in the saddle and began to pedal as teh flash boiler and dome built up pressure. he then opened the steam valve a eased off teh piston-brake, and the cycle began to propel itself.

A flash of lightning jumps betwee severalclouds then earths itself on the rod attatchef to the steeple of the church.. then another flash jumps direct from cloud to steeple it reveals the shape of a catamaran hulled dirigible at about one hundred foot above ground. a hatch in the floor of the central gondola opens and the barrel of a wichester rifle is seen protruding ,it fires at the church bell in the steeple.... BONG......BONGbongBONG....BONG.BONG, the rifle is raised back inside and a ladder is dropped out along with a large coil of rope , a voice is heard from inside swearing in what sounds like castilian spanish but older as though it were two hundred years behind the times as a loued crack is heard and a spotlight comes on at the bow and stearn of the Areion 3 and ten seconds later a pair of harpoons are fired into the ground as the voice says good i'm lined up . one hit next to the board walk the othe at the far side of the building then a gentmanis seen climbing out of the gondola down the ladder as the air ship slowly settels to an altitude of fifty feet,as the ladder toches down Miles steps off it and the ship slowly rises up to the lenth of the tethers.the lights go out as it starts to rise. not as sound of engines has been heard during the whole operation. if not for the rifle firing on the bell no one would know the ship was here. miles walk into the saloon and asks the barkeep for a drink "Whiskey neat and a cuppa coffee with a shot of rum."

A few hours later, there is a storm; the clouds whirl wildly about a circular patch of air at about 500 feet, and the figure of a man , weirdly, steps down from the vortex and walks as if using a set of stairs, down, down, until the figure reaches the street, and then seems to walk down into the ground before walking back up again, just before the head would have disappeared beneath the lawn in front of the church. brantley, still in his tophat and the rest of his kit, pulls his watch out of his vest pocket, then the cigarette case from his airshipman's leather duster, aned opend both, comparing the two.

"Well, better late than never," he says, and heads toward the saloon. Of in the distance, a familiar pinprick of light bobs along just above the road surface, the sound of the steam engine hissing away as it augers along......

"Good evening" says Miles ,sliding a unopend bottle of Beam's Choice down the bar to Brantley, Have You heard anything out from Amarillo lately ? I am hunting a airship loaded with Blight gas and i think it went down near there. i just hope it wasn't over a population center." sliding a glass down the bar a moment later. "I think she was called the 'Clementine ' out of Seattle in the Oregon Territory, and she was s'pozed to have gone down in mid june of '77, but knowbody 'round here ever heard of her, or of any kind of plage o' zombies or anything like it. but the info i have is correct i think and i thought you might know somthing,hell anything about it,given the card you let me see." miles pulls a calling card out and passes it over, "Here is mine, I forgot to give it to you before". it is a white card with

MCMR Miles Martin USN Retired Have airship will travel telegraph to won fifeserofife senwonfife treesenwonfife

Blight Gas?! What, this is that dimension? The thought flashed across his mind like a red-hot branding iron plunging into a too-small bucket of water. Well, it stood to reason. Hell, anytime the Committee or just the universe of sheer dumb luck decided to alter a timeline, weird side effects could be expected in all related threads.

Brantley took Miles's card, accepte dthe whiskey and swigged it, then poured some ionto the shotglass that he requested from the Bartender. He looked at Miles, and thought about asking if he was the same fellow who was here a while back when Callahan was running wild trying to escape that blasted Purgatory-effect vortex. At almost the same moment, he decided it wasn't worth worrying about. Either he was, and didn't mind what Brantley was, or he wasn't, and just flat didn't know. The business cards were all the same, just with different Agents' names on 'em, and were designed to mask the fact that they were all operatives in a timetravel-regulation organization.

"Well, Mr. Martin, I do know something about the Blight, and the gas that shares the name. I also know about that damnable machine and that lunatic inventor up there. I was not aware, however, that there was a market for the gas, or that anyone was shipping it. It's a bit out of my usual purview, but there are things involved on the side that are the usual thing for me to get into. This business about Zombies? Hopefully your info, or lack thereof, indicates that none of the Blight escaped due to the crash; then again, it could be that whatever plague erupted from it got stamped out or just died out. Not that I hold out much hope for that scenario"

Any further speculation or conversation was cut off by the sound of a loud hiss of steam from outside, followed by multiple shots and the wild, raw-sounding scream of what might be a woman, and then a willowy, scantily-clad woman bearing a huge revolver, a vial of blood, and fangs like those of a bengal tiger staggered in through the swinging doors of the bar. she made it almost to Brantley, who had already drawn his blaster, when the doors creaked again, and in strode a figure all wrapped up in a leather trenchcoat and bearing pistols and blades galore. The woman snarled, whipped around, and fired three shots at the newcomer, all but one missing. The one shot blasted a chunk from the side of the incredibly handsome man(?)'s head, his white-blonde hair whipping out from under his wide-brimmed, black felt flatbrimmed hat, which flew across the room and spun to a stop against the wall on the floor. The wound appeared to not faze the fellow in the least, and he trained the volley gun in his hands on the woman as she dashed across the bar away from Miles and Brantley.

"Now, hold on a secon--!" Brantley yelled, only to be cut off by the blast from the volley gun as it hit the woman and cut her in half. Suddenly, weirdly, her remains flashed into flames and then ashes...

The man turned to Brantley, and it was apparent that the chunk that had been blown away from his head had regrown, the hair grown back in a youthful shade of pale gold.

"Sorry About that," the man said, They get a little desperate when I've killed most of their seethe, and they do desperate things. Jephremiah Cornelius, Supernatural Exterminator, at your service." He extended a hand and shook theirs. It was hard to tell due to the way he held his lips when he talked, but Brantley thought he could just barely detect a pair of unnaturally-sharp canines in the man's mouth as he spoke...

'Cornelius huh i seem to remember one but you are much to young looking to be him ,and he was Terry James if i 'member right " says Miles. giving J.C. a once over as he reaches up and pulls a small device out of his right ear looks at it the puts it back ."good ting i had that damper set up in or i'd be as deaf as a post"

Brantley noted the Young man's clothing, many part sof it worked in embroidery or leather-carving in a motif of cavorting unicorns. Jephremiah... he thought. Jephremiah Cornelius...Now, where have I heard that name before...? And the Unicorn stuff.... Teh n it fell into place and jabbed his cerebrum with the realization.

"Now I remember, you're that Unicorn Jeph person, the so-called 'Edgehunter' from Boot Hill, or thereabouts." The 'Edgehunters' were were sort of a group that had been 'called up,' so to speak, by an american bishop by the name of Wiseley in Sacramento, California, and used as a sort of cadre of hunters of the malevolent supernatural, each in some way treading the very edge between Damnation and Salvation. Most of Sacramento had been cleared by the group (at its height more than a hundred strong), and then they had a falling out both with their bishop and with one another. Half had become what they hunted (werewolves, Vampires and the like), and hunted the others down.

All except Jephremiah, who had originally been recruited as a sort of vampiric turncoat; he hunted his own kind, and others. Since the falling-out and the scattering of the traitorous Edgehunters, he had been hunting them down one by one, Led (some thought coercively) by Bishop Wiseley and his cadre of priestly assistants, who kept Cornelius supplied with donated blood and somehow kept him from turning completely to the Darkness -- even though he was most of the time found alone, far from the bishop or the 'Lightpriests,' as they had come to be called.

Jeph had been explaining the preceding information to Mr. Martin as Brantley reflected upon same."I know of you and your mission," Mr. Cornelius, he interrupted, "But I also know that your keepers will allow you to do side jobs if they are important enough. He held out his own hand this time for the young man to shake. "My Name's Brantley, Mr. Cornelius, M.W. Brantley, US Customs, retired. he took out the wallet that held his badge and showed it to the young-seeming man, who immediately changed his entire stance and demeanor as he heard Brantley's self-introduction and saw the badge. Brantley's blaster was still in his hand, and he reacted to Cornelius' sudden change in attitude, pointing the horrifically-powerful (though neither Jephremiah nor Mr. Martin would have known about its power) weapon at Jeph's midsection. Now, Now, Mr. Cornelius, I'm not here to arrest or end you. Please put your weapons away and I will do the same.

As both lowered and stowed their hardware, Brantley continued. "Mr. Martin here has intimated to me the possibility of a certain, um, proposition, and i think you might be able to help us deal with part of it, and perform your Earthly duty as well. Eh, Mr. Martin?" Bantley said, eyebrow raised. "would you be amenable to Mr. Cornelius joining us? If there are 'rotters' about, he'd be invaluable, I'd think."

"sure thing and iffin this here young man is related the way i think, he may be a second of third cousin o 'mine, if i remember what my grandson told my wife about ten years ago. that is all i remember but the picture that i remember showed a feller that was your spitting image 'cept he was 'bout twenty years older than you and had a scar in the shape of a menora on the right side of his neck, also had a tatoo of a dragon up his right arm from elbow to shoulder. " miles scratches his head as he takes a drink of coffee laced whiskey then says 'dang it i wonder if i may have put that book in the Areon, if so it may have something to do with the reson i had such a heck of a time getting home"turns look over and says "bar keep what is todays date ?" turns back to brantley says quetly''i left home in portland on the 25th of july 1877, it should have taken me six days flight time,but i ran into a weird storm overthe Utah flats south of salt lake and may have lost or gained some time cus some of my intrumetation taint actin' right".